


Et Tu, Brutters?

by orphan_account



Category: South Park
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Death, Drama, Experimental, Friendship, Gen, Immortality, Latin, M/M, Other, Reality, Superheroes, Superstition
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 07:22:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1257778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Beware the Ides of March,” he could have whispered, ever a friend of the living god. “You will always die at the end.” Dedicated to Stick of Truth and HBO's Rome. One True Bromance. Character Death, Multi-chapter, Kenny-POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Et Tu, Brutters?

  
**Et Tu, Brutters?**

Chapter One: Habeas Corpus 

Unlike the mystical auguries of Rome, life in South Park lacked the novelty of foreshadowing. You didn’t have to be a superhero, psychic, or plain-old-lunatic to read signs of doom in foul weather or the bloody entrails of birds, but any superstitious habit helped. That especial-snowflake breed of nonsense could not be predicted-- only fended away by careful prayer or tribute. It paid off to be vigilant, though bets were more easily won by chance when the habits dwindled. The early weeks of spring passed dully, like the preambles of an unsure musician plucking out his worth around the beat of a metronome, a soggy gap between the seasons that begged for an interruption. 

“How many storms do you think make it to the mountains?” Butters asked, gaping up into the sky.

“It snows all the goddamned time, Butters.” Kenny stomped out into the street, careful to avoid slipping into the white slush in the gutter. He gazed towards the basketball court, reduced to a muddy mess since the last reckoning of snow in February. Behind them in the schoolyard, Kyle and Cartman bleated at each other in equally obnoxious candor. Kenny watched Stan linger by the flagpole to pander to Wendy and her flock of females. He saw Kevin and a horde of seventh graders wander past the elementary school in their trek from the the junior high. Karen was corralled into a circle of second graders passing around a dog-eared Tiger Beat.

“But those tropical storms, I mean. The one’s with names, like Annette or Nemo, and Hawaiian winds. Do you think all those brightly colored fish and sharks could fly right outta the ocean…A-and they would rain here? There’s a town in Australia where it rained fish, you know. And that Tom Cruise film about sex and frog storms? Do you think being closer to the clouds makes them crash faster?”

No one watched the weather channel when it was perpetually crappy outside, let alone wax poetic about biblical weather events. No one but Butters. Whether or not a coastal storm could stretch into the mountains with scaly air passengers, where South Park hosted it's own brand of natural disasters, was as unlikely as Cartman’s Bar Mitzvah, and Kenny told him so. 

“Yah'd think that some of these snowflakes were made of bits of all the oceans,” Butters continued, with curiosity twisting his mouth like he’d taken a bite of a sour apple, “and after four billion years, all those little molecules of water would have made their way around from South America or the Netherlands...It’s far more likely, on account of all our snow, and how some of it always gets left behind. This one little snowflake on the ground p-probably ain't seen nothing b-but the same piles of snow and rock for it's lifetime. Don't you think so?” he asserted, his brow furrowed.

The snow was a soupy, diarrhea mess under Kenny's boots. He ground his heel into the icy gloop and imagined kicking some onto Butter's neatly-pressed khaki pants. 

Butter’s stream of idle chatter had begun as they walked down the sands of Hawaii together, lasted through the plane ride back to South Park, and persisted into November-- long after Kenny had been persuaded to see _Argo_ , twice. It didn’t matter that they’d returned from Hawaii as tanned as Kardashians with sand still stuck in their unmentionable crevasses and the begrudged envy of all their classmates. Butter's winded babbling was responsible for the near-constant throb in Kenny's head that kept him digging his numb fingers into his temples in the wintry weeks that passed, long after he stopped picking granules of sand from in between his toenails. 

Kenny passed off too many caramels from his meager Halloween stash in an inconspicuous effort to shut up his perky little shadow. He bought a bag of Almond Joys and just wrap them in the bite-sized Snickers wrappers that he knew were all over Cartman's bedroom floor. He tried to pass them off at New Years, but the fat bastard was too busy moping over his reclaimed Ton-Ton to exhibit any real interest. “Clearly,” he sneered, “I can't trust that asshole with anything, let alone a plan that would have made me one with the mother-fucking Force.” In that space of time, Butters had become, as Cartman so eloquently put it, his buttling, butt-lickin' bitch. Kenny fended off invitations to tea parties and study groups like the hungry rats he used to be so familiar with. 

“Butters, are you asking me if it's going to rain?” Kenny stretched and bent his arms behind his neck, inhaling the familiar cool air. 

“Well no-”

“I'm not the weather man,” Kenny cut him off, cracking his back and reaching out towards the sky. “I don't fucking know.”

Admittedly, Kenny though that controlling the weather would have been a significantly more useful secret power, as opposed to being some unclaimed bastard spawn of a trans-dimensional nightmare city. He would have been able to send all of the past three months of snow hurtling into New Mexico-- perhaps someone would even notice the change from frigid weather, and thank him for it. He was overdue for some gratitude, after sacrificing himself for so long. You don't get to pick your faults though, as Butters would so delicately point-out-- your parents do. It was one of his many oblique kernels of wisdom that made being around Butters so listless.

The blonde chuckled nervously, matching Kenny's brisk pace across the street. “I don't think we're bound for rain or snow tonight, Ken. Then I won't ha-have to worry 'bout all this mud getting onto my school clothes and getting me grounded again.” He brushed his knuckles up and down over each other, the defining trait of his ritualistic shame.

“Thank the Gods.” 

Kenny breathed through his mouth as he walked, because everything still stunk like the hibiscus bushes in Hawaii, and the scent stung his face like the twist of his brain impaled on a flagpole. It wasn’t an unfamiliar pain, to be honest, but Kenny was just used to dying soon after. Except...he had gone over a cliff in Hawaii and it didn't cave in his skull. He crossed the street-- no cars, no stray bullets, no wild herds of animals, no nothing. Everything smelt salty, like the ocean. Not at all like the taste of blood in his mouth.

Kenny hadn't died since...He couldn't remember. An overwhelming sense of shame enveloped him when he realized that the event of his last demise had actually _slipped his mind_. Like everyone else, he’d forgotten, and a guilt-fueled despair surged through him like an electric shock, strong enough that it could have stopped his heart from churning the blood to his twitching feet and addled brain. But it didn’t, and that immortal pain was a force to be reckoned with.

Kenny bitterly started towards the court, but experienced a tremor of thought and caught himself mid-step. It was possible that he couldn't do much to ward away Butters with his own brand of nonchalance, but his alter-ego certainly could. Given the change in the weather, it was finally warm enough to reinstate his nightly capers in his underwear and hooded cape. He could get Butters off his case for a while if he gave him a well-deserved smack down as Mysterion. Uplifted by the notion of a new vigilante reckoning, Kenny whispered into Butter's ear the name of a meeting place in Mysterion's macabre tenor, and took off towards his home on the poor side of town without a moment to spare. 

Butters stood, dumbfounded but excited, waved after Kenny, and then politely stepped back on the curb to wait for the school bus. When Butters got home, he would have to psych himself up for a few hours in stolen privacy before donning the underwhelming mask of persona non grata, Professor Chaos. This left Kenny with the rest of the afternoon to himself to battle his tyrannous headache with a purple shroud. 

~

Not long after Mysterion's first appearance in the McCormick household, it became easy keep his parents sufficiently horrified and motivated to maintain part-time work. What better crime to fight than the breed of laziness that Kenny found right in his own home? His pater familias was swayed to start pumping gas in the afternoons and piss off a less sizable margin of his paycheck at the bar every night. Stuart and Carol even made it a habit to leave for work every day, instead of dicking around and cooking meth in the backyard while their kids were rotting away at public school. Fear of Mysterion drove a new rhythm into the routines of the McCormick family. But Kenny wasn’t a magician-- he was more of Nutcracker. He couldn’t change everything about his impressionable, white-trash parents, but he could see what was broken and threaten it with his tools of the trade. Like a medic, except with mask and a molotov cocktail. A true general who lived by the words, I came, I conquered, I came again. 

Kenny nodded to his father over the shelves and considered the rack of aerosol sprays with pursed lips. He grabbed a roll of duct tape, half a gallon of milk, a bag of pretzels, and some Twinkies for Karen, and chucked it all onto the counter next to a six pack of PBR. Stuart put down the Playboy he was browsing and started digging in his pockets.

“Thanks for doing the shopping today, Kenny." Stuart tossed a pack of cigarettes on top of the pile and dropped some change into the register. He snatched one for himself and beat the package against his palm as Kenny swept the rest of the purchases into a plastic bag. Stuart yanked the beer away from him before Kenny could try to hoist the cardboard six-pack off the counter; it disappeared to the other side of the till.

"You take that other pack straight to your mother, ya hear? I don't wanna hear any more about how I don't oblige that bitch."

Kenny mumbled in agreement, slinging the bag over his shoulder. Stuart fingered the fresh pack of cigarettes and after a quiet moment filled by the outside traffic and hum of refrigerators, fished out a single butt and offered it open palmed to his son. Kenny's hands quickly passed over his father’s, and the silent exchange was complete and forgotten after Kenny tucked it securely behind his ear.

"You watch out, son."

'For what, an ass-kicking, or Elvis?' Kenny thought as he pushed through the glass doors, leaving his father to his glossy, printed breasts. Stranger things had happened in this town, he thought, eying the newly opened marijuana dispensary and breathing in the skunky fragrance carried over by the breeze. Far stranger.

He had slipped an Almond Joy in his pocket just in case.

~

Kenny packed his mom's cigarettes as he crossed the street in front of a semi, watching her shiver in her damp apron by the back doors of the Olive Garden.

"You watch out, Kenny! Do you have a death wish? That truck nearly ran you over!"

It swerved, dammit. He sighed, "Mom, chill out."

Carol half-heartedly threw her arm out to strike him on the head, but Kenny tossed her the pack of Pall Malls. Lighter already in hand, she ripped one from the packaging and was exhaling thick white clouds of smoke in seconds.

"You never start smoking, Kenny. I'll beat you black and blue."

Kenny thought about the cigarette behind his ear, hidden beneath his hood. And all the cigarettes that he had pilfered in his extended and persistent mortality. He tried to answer like he didn't know the taste of his own burning flesh, or how smoke couldn't really compare to being dragged a thousand miles by a sixteen-wheeler. Carol drawled on in vague acknowledgment and sucked down the nicotine between her fingers as Kenny swung the bag around idly about his knees.

"My shift is done in four hours. Then I'll stop home to unfreeze dinner before I fetch your father from the bar."

"Oh, don't worry about it, Mom. Kevin and Karen are gonna be with friends tonight."

"You gonna hang out with your little friends too?"

"Uh, yeah. Me too."

"That's my baby boy. I’ll bring you home a slice of pie," She murmured fondly, patting the peak of his hood, and through the fog of her exhalations, Kenny saw a naive but genuine smile.

When she finally retreated back into the warm, bustling kitchen, Kenny ambled home, listening to the wind beat against his plastic bag, his mind swept back to the smell of salty ocean air and bushes of bright flowers. When a passing car pitched a cigarette out of their window, he scooped it off the ground and used the butt to light his own. A little death was better than none at all.

~

He really wished he could control the weather, Kenny thought as he rubbed his hands together. It was pretty fucking cold for nine-thirty at night in the middle of March. Still hovering in the ‘teens, at least.

Nights in South Park were never truly dark. The bright, orbiting bodies washed out every crevasse with icy shimmer on the wet pavement, and the day-old remnant snow pasted to the windows reflected the lights of neon bar signs and passing semis a thousand-fold into warm, silent homes. It was early in the evening, but the only shadows were cast by dumpsters and lampposts and sneaky little boys with busted window latches.

Kenny had expected Butters to arrive before him; he followed the blue bootprints that wound behind the used car lot to the railroad track, and saw the gleam of Professor Chaos's helmet easily. Butters had worn a sweatsuit underneath his foil armor, which made him look even less threatening than usual-- then Kenny realized that he had brought a yellow thermos along with him. It teetered on the iron track as Chaos mumbled his begrudging speeches under his breath and jumped in between the wooden slats, apparently checking for loose railroad spikes. Yellow oven mitts could be seen past his aluminum foil gauntlets, slipping into the iron crevasses and fingering the unyielding metal. Kenny positioned himself a few feet behind him and struck Mysterion's signature pose. A lone train whistle sounded in the distance.

"I’m here to put an end to you, Chaos!"

Butters spiraled off the tracks into an ungraceful heap. Unwinding his cape from his shoulders, Chaos and his signature scowl was unveiled. He gestured behind him into the pale night and stuttered, "N-not this time, Mysterion! I came prepared to thwart your immaculate concept- I mean intent!"

"You came with cocoa." Mysterion was a master of observation, after all. He relaxed his stance, noticing a long row of gleaming copper pieces balanced on the rails, some askew from Chaos's surprised misstep. “And...pennies?”

"Well, yeah!" Chaos insisted weakly, stuffing his heavily-mitted hands into his concealed pockets. He pulled out a Ziploc bag of coins. "I've picked up these pennies all over town, and I'll leave 'em on the tracks to get all squished by the train unless you yield to my hideous, uh, will! What legal tender will you rely on now, plebian!” 

"Chaos, it's a federal crime to destroy currency, but I don't think anyone's going to miss a few pennies." Though inwardly, Kenny balked at the heinous idea, and almost attributed it to Cartman, considering the innate spite it took to waste pennies in front of the poorest kid in town. But Mysterion was beyond the petty, miserly habits of his true-self, and stood in anticipation for the real threat. 

"S-shows what you know. Some of 'em are wheat pennies. And you can’t save them." At that declaration, Kenny rolled his eyes and gave a rakish, sinister laugh, breaking the stoic persona of his alter-ego. Overall, Butters had thought it was a pretty grand scheme. He’d even swiped the coins from the market’s take-a-penny plates when he was buying fresh tomatoes for dinner. He’d taken the pennies out of the change he was supposed to return to his mother. Surely, he had true copper balls, to accomplish all of that-- or at least balls coated in zinc.

Apparently, Butter's entire afternoon had been devoted to this...unholy scheme. It was so pathetic and insulting, it almost made Kenny regret his plan to pulverize the kid into next week. Butters might be a la cuchara-hermano south of the border, or a homicidal tap-dancing prodigy, but he was a regular pussy when Kenny really needed it to count-- when all he really wanted was to fight an even match. But he couldn’t figure the odds when he knew no one could truly beat him at his own game. Butters was threatening his livelihood with the potential worth of thirty-five cents.

Kenny strode up to Chaos and clocked him in the eye with a rattling crunch. Kenny shoved him over the side of the tracks, with no less fervor than was necessary to upend lawn chair at a soccer game. The bag of coins flew up into the air and scattered mock constellations across the steel rails. Even in the dry, frigid air, his blood began to boil, and benevolence melted away as he grasped the candy bar in his pocket. Though Mysterion typically held to his principles, he’d been absent too long in this stagnant weather, and Kenny’s conscience quickly leapt to the conclusion that mercy dealt out no rewards, not in the games that he wanted to play. After all, in all their years together, what mayhem hadn't he and the rest of the gang put Butters through already?

"You really, fucking suck at this Butters."

Under a furrowed brow, and a freshly-bruising eye, Chaos lit up with agitation. He pouted and started, "But, I'm not Butters-"

"Bending pennies is what kids in the pioneer days did for fun. The Coon knows more about evil villainy than you. Maybe I should just play with Cartman instead!"

Something curdled in Kenny's stomach as the words came out of his mouth. But he growled for emphasis, and fisted the candy bar behind his back.

The blonde blinked in confusion in the blinding moonlight. "Hey! Eric isn’t evil! He’s just  
misunderstood! Why else could he really know so much--?”

"No, Eric Cartman is a fat, wriggling, hate-filled tumor fated to plague my existence! Jesus Christ!" Kenny slapped his free palm against his masked forehead. "Am I giving the lessons now, Professor? Don’t you know what villains are supposed do? They’re cruel, mean, and fucking loud. They’re annoying and they always have the newest technology. But most importantly, they try to kill the heroes! That's what makes them evil! They fight them, they torture them, and kill them. And it's damn honorable, and unjustified--"

"But-"

"--and you're not even trying! You're supposed to be like...nuts with anger! You're Chaos! You can do whatever you want, but you're just a pussy who smells like flowers, and you don't care enough about the game to take it seriously!" His strides towards the quiet boy were swift, in spite of the ice that gleamed on the tracks.

“What game are we playing again?!” Butter's eyes widened in fear as Mysterion withdrew the candy-bar and brandished it in front of him.

"I'm impatient, villain!" He dragged Chaos upright by the neck of his cape, held the blue wrapper against his throat, and breathed steam into his face. Butters twisted in his grip, bucking away from him and throwing out his arms, flinging his oven mitts away into the snow.

"Show me the real Chaos!" Mysterion sneered-- only to be surprised when Butter’s reached into his armor, and with both hands painted something sharp and shining into his chest. 

Panting, Chaos landed back into the heap of powdery snow, and Kenny's hands immediately found the sharp intrusion. The familiar wet warmth of blood seeped past his clothes. Familiar like a papercut, or a snake bite-- only a flesh wound. 

It wasn't a knife, but the slice of a five-pointed shuriken that Chaos had rammed up into his ribcage, the same weapon that had been lodged in Butter's eye only too long ago. It was deep in his soft tissue, pain vibrating around his ribcage like a feral pinball. He touched the metal star and winced, his breath battered out of him like a popped car tire. It was sharp too, he thought as he brushed his fingers over it’s curved edges. Chaos, still in a heap in the slush, cradled his cut hands, not impervious to the weapon’s bite. He made warbling noises of concern that echoed hollowly in between Kenny's ears. The idiot should have thrown it.

Kenny grimaced, gripped the steel edge and yanked ninja star out from it’s awkward angle, nearly taking a chunk of his stomach with him. The pulsing gash spurted out fresh turrets of blood. Butters gave an anxious squawk at his expense, startling Kenny into stepping backwards onto the railing. Then he felt the ground slip away from him. More pennies danced across the track, his head cracked against the iron beams, and the world abruptly went black.

~

He awoke to the steaming cry of a train whistle and the feeling of hands digging into his armpits, attempting to drag him off the track, away from the churning rumble of the approaching train. Kenny's hands fumbled at his sides, and he could feel the clots of cold blood settling into the material of his gloves.

“Oww...”

“Don't try to move Mysterion, I gotcha.” Butters sniffed back tears and yanked harder on Kenny's cape, only slightly losing his footing on the gravel. 

"Did...did you just try to kill me?" Kenny's arm brushed against the shell of the empty thermos, and he cast his clenched hand towards it. Cutting into his palm was the ninja star, but it clattered into the shadowy slats beneath him, leaving the imprint of an upside-down pentagram in his glove, wet with warm blood. 

"I only meant to bargain for it, honest!" Butters cried, his wet face glowing like a distant moon. "I'm awful sorry, I really am!" His nails were digging into Kenny's skin through his clothes and hurt worse than the gash or the crack in his skull. Lights danced around Butter's foil armor, creating a noxious halo around the boy, and making Kenny reel with nausea. “We gotta get off the track!”

“No.” Kenny eyes focused clearly on the punctured imprint in his palm, and then on the sky above, peppered with the faintest silhouettes of stars. An ear-shattering whistle peeled into the fuzzy darkness and the track began to tremble. He stretched out his legs into the gravel and winced, swimming in the cyclone of lights around his head.

“Come on, Mysterion! There's a train coming!”

"I take it back, Butters.” The blood rose in the back of his throat, but he spluttered out in laughter, “You're a real evil mastermind. I guess I had it coming.” Beneath him, he felt the flat faces of pennies shaking on the rail. Their rattling vibrations hummed in his ears like clouds of songbirds. 

“Ahh!” he winced, “Let me go. I'm finished!” 

“Kenny, No! You gotta stop being so heavy!”

There's a retort that doesn't quite make it past his tongue to his lips, but Kenny spat up a little blood as he chuckled. His heart quaked with the ground beneath them, so he slapped at Butter's iron grip on his arms, his knuckles catching him brusquely in the chin. “Aw, little buddy. Fuck off,” was all he could manage with his remaining breath, failing weakly against Butter’s fearful embrace. 

“It's gonna kill you! That train is gonna squash you into human jelly!”

“And you too, Butters!”

With the last of his strength, he roared and pried Butter's fingers off of him, until the satisfying snap of his bones yielded the absent pressure of the boy's hands. Butters leaped backwards off the track, cradling his crooked appendage and collapsing in the mud and snow, a tragic picture emblazoned by the oncoming gold lights of the train. ‘Beware the Ides of March,’ he could have whispered, ever a friend of the living god. ‘You will always die at the end.’

The pressure of grinding metal against his bones broke him clean in half. The world rattled like an angry snake, and as his mind cartwheeled through time and space and probably a few sewage treatment plants on its way back to Earth. He touched the scant images of bright silver spiders with imaginary fingers and breathed in the smell of copper and grease through gritted teeth that didn’t exist. When he finally awoke in his dark bedroom, he found himself still cold but quite alone, the chill of his parka's zipper twisting against his skin as he turned over in abbreviated sleep. He buried his eyes into the fur trim while the tortuous, piecemeal memories of his phantom limbs scattering around him peppered his senses, and the strange polarity of his sacrifice warmed his freshly-beating heart, heralded by the transcendent, animal wail of Leopold Butters Stotch.

**Author's Note:**

> Next installment soon? Thanks for making it to the end.


End file.
